As of December 2025, roughly 107,000 people in the United States are on the national organ transplant waiting list. That number fluctuates daily as new patients are added and others receive transplants, but the list has hovered above 100,000 for years. Despite a record 48,149 transplants performed in 2024, demand still far outpaces supply.
Waiting List by Organ Type
Kidneys dominate the waiting list. Of the roughly 107,000 candidates, about 94,000 are waiting for a kidney, making it by far the most needed organ. The remaining candidates break down as follows:
- Liver: approximately 9,000 candidates
- Heart: approximately 3,900 candidates
- Lung: approximately 1,000 candidates
- Pancreas: approximately 800 candidates
Some patients need more than one organ (a combined kidney-pancreas transplant, for example), so the total of individual organ counts doesn’t always match the overall candidate total perfectly.
How Long the Wait Actually Takes
Wait times vary enormously depending on the organ, your blood type, your geographic region, and how sick you are at the time of listing. Kidney transplants involve the longest waits by a wide margin. The last year for which a true median wait time could even be calculated was 2013, when the median sat at 49.2 months, just over four years. Since then, fewer than half of listed kidney candidates in any given year have received a transplant, which means a reliable median can no longer be determined. In practical terms, many kidney candidates wait five years or more.
Heart and lung candidates tend to move through the list faster because allocation for those organs prioritizes medical urgency. A patient in acute heart failure, for instance, can receive an organ within weeks or even days. Liver allocation similarly prioritizes the sickest patients first.
Who Is on the Waiting List
The waiting list reflects significant racial and ethnic disparities, particularly for kidneys. Black Americans make up about 13% of the U.S. population but account for 27% of all candidates on the transplant waiting list. The gap is even more pronounced for kidneys specifically, where Black candidates represent 29% of those waiting. This disparity is driven largely by higher rates of conditions that cause kidney failure, including high blood pressure and diabetes, along with systemic differences in access to early treatment that might delay or prevent the need for a transplant.
For other organs, the picture looks different. Black candidates make up about 29% of the heart waiting list but only 6% of the liver list, reflecting how different diseases affect different populations.
People Die Waiting Every Day
In 2023, an average of 13 people died each day while on the transplant waiting list. That’s an improvement from 16 deaths per day in 2021, a decline driven partly by the record pace of transplants in recent years. Still, thousands of people die or become too sick for surgery before an organ becomes available.
The transplant system has been gaining ground. The 48,149 transplants performed in 2024 represented a 23% increase over just five years earlier. But the waiting list hasn’t shrunk proportionally, because new patients are continually added as others are removed.
How Organs Are Matched to Recipients
The national matching system, run by the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), uses only medical and logistical factors to rank candidates. Income, insurance status, and celebrity play no role. When an organ becomes available, the system automatically screens out anyone who is incompatible based on blood type, body size, and immune system markers. From the remaining pool, candidates are ranked based on criteria specific to each organ type.
For kidneys, the key factors are how long you’ve been waiting, how well your immune system matches the donor’s, and your distance from the donor hospital. For hearts and lungs, medical urgency carries the most weight, meaning the sickest patients are offered organs first regardless of how long they’ve been listed. Liver allocation also prioritizes urgency. Across all organ types, children get priority for organs from pediatric donors, because proper organ size is critical and children respond better to child-sized organs.
Geography matters for every organ. Transplants are most successful when the time between organ recovery and surgery is short, so candidates at hospitals closer to the donor generally receive offers before those farther away.
The Donor Gap
The core problem behind the waiting list is simple: not enough people donate. Surveys consistently show that about 95% of Americans say they support organ donation, yet only around 56% have actually registered as donors. One deceased donor can save up to eight lives through organ donation, which means even modest increases in donor registration can have an outsized effect on the waiting list. Living donation, particularly for kidneys, also helps close the gap. A healthy person can donate one kidney and live a normal life, and living-donor kidneys tend to function longer than those from deceased donors.